political realties at work in rural and urban community thousands, all over the confederate south. most women never cross the line between protest and direct action. but when mary jackson got no satisfaction she recruited 300 town and country women to a meeting at the belvedere baptist church in richmond, got up into the pulpit to rally her troops, told them to gather the next morning at the entrance to capital square, to leave their children at home, a detail i love, and to come armed. it was truly a confederate spring of soldiers' wives discontent. these women made themselves count. the wave of food riots had a measurable impact on confederate war policy forcing revisions of conscription and tax policy. but its greatest effect, i think, was the way it prompted the development of a massive welfare program by the states, that in allocating scarce funds and food stuff to the release of

soldiers' wives and children dwarf anything undertaken in the north. this is a broadside that comes from the, a year later when there was another series of riots showing that the confederate government, which is, this confederate military, which is essentially controlling the food supply in the confederacy at that point was being forced to give food back to the counties to relief agents to give to distribute to women and children. in the hard of confederate national territory, the mass of white southern women had emerged as formidable adversaries of the government in the long struggle over the justice of its military policies. by insisting that the state live up to its promises to support them, even taking up arms to do so, these poor white women who had never participated in politics before stepped decisively into the making of history. well, what are we to make of this? their politics are not easily read through our usual way of understanding women's concerns. these were not feminists. they didn't belong to any

organization. they didn't belong to a women's rights organization. and, in fact, they didn't speak a language of rights or women's rights or citizens rights at all. so, while it is tempting to cast this history of confederate women, as an episode in the history of citizenship in the united states, i think there is reason to entertain, a less predictable view of the women's politics. for the mobilization of poor, mostly, rural women in the confederate south during the civil war, bears resemblance, not so much to the process of gradual extension of, citizenship, around which most american political history is framed. the liberalism framework, but far more to the way politics was back tipsed by poor, rural and urban people in many parts of the modern world. what one historian has called the politics of the governed in most of the political world. if the new political assertiveness of southern women

didn't bring down the confederacy, and i am not arguing that it did, it did represent a powerful challenge to the confederate vision of the people and the republic and it showed the limits of their pro slavery and anti-democratic nationalism. any government that took their men would ultimately have to answer to them. the reckoning was slaves politics. well that was even more direct and consequential. at the birth of the american republic, thomas jefferson had warned that slavery destroyed slaves love of country. it made them allies of any foreign power that sanctioned their emancipation. slavery, he predicted, turns slaves into enemies and nurtured traders at the american breast. clearly he was thinking about dunmore's proclamation and the american revolution. but secessionists faced the same problem. and they seemed heedless of the dangers. gave no thought to what slaves

would do. discounted entirely the matter of slaves' allegiance. but moving decisively to grasp the opening history offered in their own long war against the slaveholders. slaves made their loyalty and allegiance count. and created a significant problem of treason in the confederacy. the problem was evident first to masters on plantations who as early as january 1861 found evidence of what was called sedition, as well as powder and plots of network and slave communication providing valuable intelligence to the enemy. indeed the plantation emerged as a critical site of civil war politics because it was the ground of a struggle that radiated up and out through the various levels of government in the confederacy. slaves moved tactically and by stages, men and women both, equal and active participants in the whole array of insurrectionary activities calculated to destroy the

institution of slavery, their masters' power and the prospects of the confederacy as a pro-slavery nation. excluded from political life, as a matter of foundational principle, slaves' politics registered profoundly nonetheless, not just in union policy where we have been trained to look, but in confederate policy as well. a state and federal officials, attempted to make slaves labor count for the cause. slaves' activities had crucial consequences not just for owners but for the confederate government and military. confederate politicians had begun the war, boasting of slaves as an element of strength. but when they demanded the labor of male slaves to support the war event, a policy called impressment working on fortifications as here, for example, the government and military soon found themselves in a losing conflict with slave owners unwilling to surrender openly rebellious property.

even as the government attempted to draw on slave property to wage the war, slave owners attempted to draw on the army to protect slave property from the war. indeed many saw the army as nothing less than a giant slave patrol. and complained bitterly when military plans exposed their property to the enemy. its not the protection of property one of the duties of the army in the field, a virginia slaveholder wrote his congressman, demanding that the army position itself, so as to staunch the flow of slaves to union lines in his area near newport news, virginia. of course, slaves were streaming into union lines whenever they had the opportunity. and from the point of view of slaveholder, it was the confederate army's job to prevent this. taken as a class, slaveholders proved spectacularly unwilling to sacrifice property for nation. quote, the planter is more ready

to contribute his sons and his slaves to war the mobile register declared. you cheerfully yield your children to your town country, how refuse your servants another broadside blasted. and perhaps there is nothing surprising about this. in a country founded explicitly for the protection of property and slaves. given the protections written into the confederate constitution there was only so much the government could be, could do to compel compliance. planters colluded with their slaves in foreign to pressment, they occupied territory to hold on to their property, they attacked military commander who is did not make a priority of their interest in setting military strategy, and they demanded that state and local politicians represent their interests against the demands of the war department. for some slaveholders, any state would do. union, confederate, brazilian, as long as it protected their property and slaves. like their counterparts in other slave societies, confederate

slaveholders often proved to be more concerned with property than nation. do historians robust assertions of the strength endurance of confederate nationalism take that into account? how else are we to explain the actions of a group reckless enough to take a region and all its people into a perilous war but not patriotic enough to do what it took to fight it? but if slaveholders could prove a weak link in the confederacy, even bigger resistance came from the slaves themselves. enslaved men resisted oppression for a variety of reasons, it forced a separation from their families, withdrew their labor from their support, and exposed them to a significant threat of disease. but military men knew they resisted for political reasons, too. one engineer in charge of building defensive works in northern virginia said bluntly that slaves, quote, refuse to do labor that will thwart the

federals they look upon as fighting for their freedom. in choosing every chance, i'm sorry, in seizing every chance to run away from the works, often straight to the enemy, the property insisted on acting as persons. persons who saw the war, as a critical moment in their own political history and the long war against slavery. the mix of compromise in state resistance contracted problems for military men. they knew slaves posed a danger to their on payings but couldn't pursue them as other persons were caught providing aid and comfort to the openmy. enemy. it is surely revealing that the best descriptions of slaves anti-confederate activities come from military men who paid the price of their disloyalty and heedless of the complications, bluntly called them traitors and enemies who posed a threat to the very existence of the confederate republic. the dilemma came to an official

head early on, in pensacola harbor in march 1862 when a confederate officer fed up with runaway slaves carrying intelligence to the enemy across the bay, initiated a court-martial of six slave men caught escaping to the enemy at fort pickens. the charges, quote, attempt to violate the 57th article of war, holding correspondence with, or giving intelligence to the enemy. whoever heard of a negro slave being arraigned before a court-marshal for a violence of the articles of war, their incredulous master railed. who indeed? in charging slaves with treason the officer posed profound questions about their political status and membership. did slaves owe allegiance to the state? could they be traitors? were they subject to military law? these questions reverberated up the chain of command to the office of the secretary of war and they were never resolved. indeed what resolution was possible?

confederate commanders had to be able to recognize slaves as traitors, if only to contain the damage they posed to the military. but how could that be adopted as official policy without profound damage to their status as property, whose only allegiance was to their masters? if slaves were traitors, clearly they were no longer just slaves. and this is what the master said. he said, they're runaways, give them back to me, i will deal with them, as if it was 1840. and they had just run away. and the confederate officer was fed up. and he opened pandora's box. but the kind of transformations the pensacola officer had acknowledged were irreversible. and they had profound ramifications in the confederacy as the need to harness slaves' labor relentlessly pressed recognition of the only terms on which slaves would be willing to offer it. it's now a very familiar part of

the narrative of the american civil war. how slaves actions transformed a war for union into a war for emancipation. but less well-known is how 4 million slaves resistance to the pro-slavery agenda of the confederate government pushed it down its own reluctant path to slave enlistment recapitulating a struggle in the french revolution. none of the plans adopted in the confederacy ever reached the scale of the one proposed by major general patrick claiborne of the army of tennessee, who in december 1863 made clear the stern logic of events in a slave regime at war. it was as blunt an assessment of the damage slaves were wreaking on the confederate military as one will ever read. we are waging war with the enemy in the front, and an

insurrection in the rear, he said. and do what he had to do to earn their loyalty for the confederacy. his most shocking contention was not that the confederacy use slave men as soldiers to replenish its armies, but that such a move could be accomplished only by recognizing slaves own political desires and objectives in the war under way. we must bind him to our cause, by no doubtful bonds he advised. and the only bond sufficient is the hope of freedom. it would be preposterous to expect him to fight against it with any degree of enthusiasm. when we make soldiers of them, which we must, we must make free men of them beyond all question. thus did slave emancipation arise in confederate history as in so many other cases, as a military imperative. the critical pattern of war in emancipation has been radically

underspecified in the historical literature. by a long, circuitous route, president davis and general robert e. lee were eventually forced to con tend as claiborne had with the humanity and the politics of the slaves whose status as property they had seceded to secure. by 1864 and '65, officials in the highest reaches of the confederate government were forced to try to win slaves over to the confederate cause. it's a little hard to digest, but there you have it. forced to try to win slaves over to the confederate cause because they so desperately needed their military serve. as incredible as it might seem they wanted to enlist slaves as soldiers. and even then with national survival at stake, very few were prepared to entertain emancipation as the terms of that service as claiborne had insisted they must. in a tightly controlled, this

is a union cartoon of what would happen if the confederacy did it. they said they would make it to union lines within two minutes of being mustered into the confederate army. in a tightly controlled, top down way, that included the public solicitation of general robert e. lee's support, president davis, secretary of state benjamin, and virginia governor william smith struggled but mostly failed to gain the support of the public and congress for a policy of enlisting slaves in the confederate army. the confederate congress did eventually pass a law allowing the use of slave men in the army in march of 1865, but that law explicitly stated that it, quote, did nothing to authorize a change in the relation, which the said slaves bear toward their owners. keep in mind that they were prohibited from doing that. they couldn't make a change. the constitution prohibited them from doing that.

the congress, in other words, proposed to enlist still enslaved men as soldiers in the confederate army. and they refused even to, at the 1 hour, to write an emancipation clause. the war department did write orders requiring that slave men would be allowed to serve, quote, only by their own consent. that's the end of slavery right there. by their own consent. and with free papers from their masters. but by late march, desperate for men to hold the license outside of richmond, even davis dispenced with that requirement of consent and called on the governor of virginia to draft all black men, slave and free, between the ages of 18 and 45 for service as soldiers. in the last desperate days of the war, two companies of black soldiers were raised and drilled on the streets of richmond. and dispatched to fight on the fortifications in front of petersburg, days before the end. little remains by which to ascertain their status. the confederate congress and the

virginia legislature refused to the bitter end to condone the emancipation of any slave men who served. the story of arming slaves and how confederates arrived at that juncture is surely the most dramatic kind of reckoning white southerners had brought on themselves with war. it is also one potent measure of the political incoherence that national project had come to by the end of the war. and it is also a potent statement of the significance of the politics of the unfranchised and of the home front in the war. davis and his cabinet had been forced to do the unthinkable. undermine owners paramount claim to their slaves and move off to enlist slave men to save the slaveholders republic. that episode hardly suggests that confederates chose independence over slavery, as so many people continue erroneously to insist.

it is rather a profound indication of the structural problems the confederacy faced as a slave regime at war. and it is the ultimate measure of what slaves themselves had wrought in confederate political life. the confederate states of america was transformed by war and the confederate political project was undone by the very people who had been taken in it. military defeat was coupled with political failure. given the pro-slavery, and anti-democratic aspiration of the confederacy, there was a certain justice in that. by april 1865 the confederacy was in ruins. a nation founded in a risky bid to render slavery and the power of american slaveholders permanent had failed spectacularly bringing down the most powerful slave regime in the western world. to say it changed the course of history is not, i think, to say too much. thank you. [ applause ]

>> i would be happy to take questions. >> you talked about women's part -- >> you talked about women's part

in the war. i read many, many years ago that a maryland woman wrote the tennessee plan which was actually the plan that started in tennessee and went all the way to savannah. and in all of your -- well -- have you heard anything about that? >> no, i have not. >> that she was actually a confederate woman who was sick and tired of the war. >> and she was handing sherman a plan? >> well, she gave it to the government, to the war department. >> no, i have never -- never -- >> in any of your research you haven't? >> no. i've never seen that claim. i mean, there are many claims about, and some verifiable, about confederate women spies passing significant military intelligence.

in particular campaigns. but that particular claim, no, i have not heard. have any of you guys heard that one? >> thank you. >> sorry. it sounds better fiction than history maybe that one. >> you made reference to the movie "cold mountain." >> yes. >> the first time i saw it i thought it was preposterous, this couldn't have happened. and then i read some research that said yeah, a lot of it was true. i thought there might have been scenes that were over the top such as torturing that one woman, tying her to the fence. are you saying that it was probably accurate, that there were examples like that? >> well, in fact, the person who's going to speak tomorrow, vickie bynum, is the one who first wrote about these documents from the north carolina archives. that's how i learned about them. and they're almost literal transcriptions. vickie might talk more about this. she knows a lot more about this than me. but this is the kind of situation where -- there was so much torture -- they were so desperate to round up these guerrillas. and the governor was sending out orders, sending out troops with

orders that were extremely liberal. he would deny it later. but they claimed they were acting on the of on the governor's authority. and when they would go to the home places of these guerrilla bands they only found the women. and they knew the women knew where the men were laying out. and there are -- were investigations afterwards, after the allegations of torture started to be reported to the governor, he, maybe for political cover, maybe because he was a decent guy, which you always thought he was, vance, he sent somebody up to investigate and then there were these long reports that showed up in the north carolina -- they were written to the governor and they're in the north carolina archives and they describe actually what charles frazier said, that in one case a woman with an infant child was put on the snowy ground in front of her. she was chitied. the child was put -- i think that's in the movie, too. they said if she didn't reveal the whereabouts of her husband and sons the baby would stay there until it died of ex-poeshd. they put women's thumbs under fence posts. they whipped women. they hanged them. i mean, it was regarded as, you

know, a real war against the women. and some of the soldiers were extremely disturbed by it. others defended it as necessary in the war against the guerrillas. and yeah, these are literal -- they're transcriptions. frazier never says anything in the front of that book about the north carolina documents, but they're archival documents in every case. >> have you found any evidence that the confederacy based its military strategy on the idea that slaves liked being slaves? >> that's an interesting question. hmm. >> well, i must say that in all these years of doing research the thing i can't get my mind around is that they would inaugurate this movement, including early military plans, with no thought to what the slaves would do. the people who were thinking

explicitly about what the slaves would do were unionists who were saying, are you crazy? you think it's bad enough that you can't -- you know, use the fauchblth sla fugitive slave law to get slaves returned. what's going to happen when there is no fugitive slave law and they get to the union army -- i mean, they just predicted what would happen. secessionists for obvious reasons were not willing to say you know, there's going to be -- vote for us, there's going to be a terrible war. so they were kind of in denial. but even when the war began there seemed very -- what's really stunning is all this talk -- and you can never really tell what people believe from what they're saying because this is all a political campaign. but they're saying slaves are an element of strength and war. and they believe they will be an element of military strength. that our population is smaller but we can put all the white men in the military and we can use all these slaves to do everything else. grow the food, do the military labor. you know, robert e. lee would

say most military service is digging, it's labor, and we can have all this sort of ancillary troops to do this. that's why impressment is so important. you know, officers, commanders would send out requisitions for 5,000 male slaves from a county and they'd get 300. after they went out and had to drag them out at gunpoint and threaten the owners. so this quickly collapsed. and i would say one of the things i learned, not being a military historian, is that the military men, other than planters, who got the -- who learned the truth very quickly and first when the war started about what slaves wanted, the next people to learn that lesson were the military. people in the government, politicians, talked the taurks the pro-slavery talk a lot longer than military men. the most radical plans

recognizing slaves' anti-confederate desires came from military men. so i think it's kind of the opposite. i think there was in a sense military plans in a general sense of military labor, military manpower plans that were laid early on with very deeply pro-slavery assumptions about slaves, persons, and beliefs, and positions. but they gave way pretty quickly in the face of slaves' actions. and you know, military men have to -- they have to make plans in real time, and they have to work. so they adjusted. and they started to counter the actions of slaves. i mean, do you think we'll ever know how many slaves were executed by military men for interfering with -- this pensacola case i talked about was so interesting because this guy was stupid enough to make his assumptions official.

you know, he tried them for treason. how often do you think that happened compared to what they call drumhead court-martial or just execution? i don't think we'll ever know the whole story there but there's plenty of evidence around that we haven't fully gathered and weighed. >> hi, stephanie. jenny weber, the university of kansas. how are you doing? >> hi, jenny. >> okay. so based on this question, it seems to me that they might not have been entirely wrong in that assumption when you see that the union doesn't really capitalize on what the slaves are doing for like a year and a half into the war. i'm just curious what you see given the research you've been doing on the impact of the emancipation proclamation from the confederate side. >> i mean, it depends what you

mean by the emancipation proclamation. like january 1, 1863 things are already pretty far advanced in -- >> i'm thinking the september. >> the september, the preliminary? well, there's no doubt that -- i mean, a lot of the time when i was reading these srss, especially military men's accounts, i felt like i was reading calculus problems. i mean, these are math problems. they have this many people. we don't. you know, the chief of the bureau of conscription is saying there are no men to be had. they begin the war estimating how many white men can we get in the confederate army. but i think the original number is something like 700,000 or something. and you know, they reach that at a certain point and then there's no more people to get. so this is what clayburn's saying in this document, is there's only -- the union has all these sources. immigrants, slaves. they have all these -- a bigger population to start with. immigrants who they're fast-tracking to citizenship to get into the military. and slaves. and we have no more sources.

that's why the radical ideas are coming from there. in that sense i think the emancipation proclamation fundamentally changes the calculation of individual slave men. i think the emancipation proclamation as a preliminary one is a critical moment. i did see some really amazing sources in the shenandoah valley where the military reversals are constant, you know, places turning over 70-something times in one case. winchester, some people think. and there's a great diary of a confederate woman who has a small farm, two small sets of slaves on two properties, and you can see that her slaves don't leave. at various points the union army's in and some slaves retreat with them but not hers. and then the emancipation proclamation is passed and a union officer comes to their